Jason May will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
This talk will introduce common ways of using Perl to have processes communicate to each other. It will cover things like how to communicate between parent/child processes and between completely separate processes, whether it is on the same host or a different one. It will also cover libraries and tools that facilitate building and testing these aspects, such as Reflex, AnyEvent, and netcat.
Common examples that are applicable to each aspect of the talk will be discussed, such as coordinating processing information in parallel, working with job queues, and establishing gateways. Demonstrations, useful references, and caveats will be provided along the way.
Because people keep asking for it, I asked Wrox if it was OK to share the table of contents and they said "sure!".
Please note that this is in flux. Chapters 1 through 7 are written, along with most of Chapter 8. Everything after that is very much subject to change (which is why the TOC isn't even formatted for those chapters). Also, you'll note the lack of Unicode. That was going to be in Chapter 7, but I've moved it to Chapter 9 and haven't update the table of contents yet.
For some weeks I now have my Perl benchmarking ready.
It is a whole little infrastructure, based on Tapper and Codespeed, an own not regularly updated CPAN mirror (to keep dependencies stable), and a dedicated benchmark machine.
The second server (perl64.org: 6 core AMD Opteron 4180, Debian/Squeeze)
is dedicated to only run benchmarks, without any disruption from email, web,
or other services. I also took care of disabling all OS features that typically lead to deviation, like ASLR and Core Performance Boost.
So what do you do when you need to load a module from a string? Do you do eval "require $module"? Well as many of you may have read, that is How (not) to Load a Module. This mechanism is unsafe in certain situations, but sadly there hasn’t been a good answer for it.
What do you do when you want to load a module only if it is installed, or only if it is of a certain version or higher (without dieing). Of course there are eval ways around that too, but could they be easier?
This post announces Module::UseFrom, which lets you do all of these things. But it gets better! All of these actions are done using the much safer bareword form of use, accomplishes this at compile time, and does it without any evals[1]!
It does all this using Devel::Declare to inspect a package variable in your module and inject a bareword use statement. This means that it avoid most (all?) of the problems Schwern’s post (above); if it fails to create the right statement, perl (yes lowercase) dies on the use Bareword::Module statement.
Linode is sponsoring a beer party at YAPC::NA 2012. We’ll have beer, wine, soda, and water available for an hour before the banquet at YAPC this year. Thanks to Linode for being so generous!
The "Learning Perl, 6th edition" book review had the distinction of being iProgrammer's most popular review of 2011, between more than 250 reviews on a vast variety of subjects with thousands of reads each, but the Perl review reached top spot with 10,800 reads (figure untill 29/12/2011)
The benefit is that it exposed the language to a wide audience, since the site appeals to a general programming public from C# to Javascript, therefore I do hope that it managed to attract "new blood" and/or converts !
Our silence regarding the progress and especially
the venue location and conference dates is owed to the restrictions of
the planned venue which explicitly forbids mentioning the date and
place before the contract is signed by both parties.
We didn't keep up with the post frequency after the first blog posts,
but as the contract should be signed at the start of January 2012, you
should see more frequent updates from us again. We can't promise to compete with the excellent communication of YAPC::NA 2012 though.
We wish you a good start in 2012 and hope to see you in Frankfurt!
Stevan Little will be giving a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
Introduced at YAPC::NA 2011, the Jackalope web-service framework was still a work-in-progress. Now a year later, Jackalope is still a work-in-progress but has seen over a year of real world usage. Come to hear what worked and what didn’t work about the framework and about building REST web-services for a large organization.
I read Schwern’s post How (not) To Load a Module just as I was wanting to dynamically load different Module::Build subclasses for different OSes. It struck me just as odd as it seems to for everyone that use-ing a module from a string should be so hard.
In my spare time, I have been working on some use problems using Devel::Declare and it gives some intersting hope here. Preliminarily I am calling it UseX::Declare but hopefully someone will come up with something better. Basically it provides a function called use_from which acts like:
use UseX::Declare;
BEGIN {
our $var = 'Net::FTP';
}
use_from $var;
Through the magic of Devel::Declare, the parser sees:
As if I did not have enough modules to take care already, I just started a new one. It is still on its beta version as I did not have much time to test it, and write a decent API. It is available in the usual place: https://metacpan.org/release/AMBS/Lingua-Identify-CLD-0.01_01
This is an interface to a library by Google for language detection. As far as I could understand, it is part of the Chrome browser, and was just released as open source. Details here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium-compact-language-detector/
It is available at GitHub, and I am happy to receive issues or pull requests. Just bear in mind that no API is still defined (although I have an idea of what I want) and that I do not have much time to solve your issues right ahead.
Finally, a thanks to Jean Véronis that pointed me the library and asked kindly for a Perl interface to it.
There will be a Game Room at YAPC::NA 2012. Our sponsor cPanel has helped us arrange this spectacular extra social event.
The idea was actually brought up on ideas.yapcna.org several times in various ways. Some people suggested doing a poker tournament, while others wanted to play RPGs, while others wanted to play board and card games, while still others wanted to do a LAN party. (Who knew there were so many gamers in the Perl community?) We decided to do them all in the form of a game room.
If you saw @kraih's recent MetaCPAN tweet, you'll know that MetaCPAN's ++ feature has been gamed. Now, we were aware there was some potential for gaming. Initially you needed a PAUSE id to be able to ++, but this had an unexpected side effect in that there were some requests for PAUSE accounts with the justification of "I'd like to be able to ++ on MetaCPAN". Because this placed an additional burden on the already busy PAUSE admins, we were asked to remove this requirement.
First of all, let me start by saying how appreciative I am to the Perl weekly newsletter http://perlweekly.com for making me aware of Citrus Perl in the first place. I've wanted to make robust GUI apps in Perl for sometime and this software appears to give me the tools I need to do just that.
The install http://www.citrusperl.com/platform/osx32.html
I currently run Snow Leopard and I wanted to be able to create apps for all recent version of OSX, so I chose the u32 build.
At which point, many people piled on and criticized this without asking why I was going to include this. I should have known better than to make such a cryptic post and then head to bed, so here's the explanation.
